Carlyle, Gabriel

The Drone Campaign Network has launched a ‘Lift the Veil’ petition, aiming to collect 20,000 signatures calling for an end to the secrecy surrounding the use of British drones in Afghanistan. UK forces are known to have carried out around 300 drone strikes in Afghanistan since 2008. Former director of public prosecutions Ken Macdonald says there is ‘pretty compelling…

In addition to killing hundreds of civilians and fuelling anger and terrorism directed against the West, US and British airstrikes by pilotless drones could also be a major obstacle to negotiating an end to the war in Afghanistan, according to a report by the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI).

Based on interviews with ‘four senior Taliban interlocutors’, the September 2012 briefing paper reports: that the Taliban ‘would be open to negotiating a ceasefire as part of a general…

The reduction of US troop numbers in Afghanistan over the past year — and the resulting sharp drop in military operations initiated by such forces — has ‘remove[d] the key driver of the [insurgents’] campaign’ and led to a substantial reduction in the number of Taliban-initiated attacks, according to a July report by the Afghanistan NGO Safety Office (ANSO).

It has long been clear that military escalation has been fuelling the war and destroying the possibilities of a negotiated peace…

Lawyers acting on behalf of Afghan bank worker Habib Rahman, who lost five relatives in a September 2010 missile attack, look set to challenge the British government in the courts over its role in helping to draw up — and implement — a US ‘kill list’.

The US claimed 8-12 ‘insurgents’ were killed in the attack, but an investigation by the Afghanistan Analysts Network’s Kate Clark found that in fact 10 civilians had been killed, and that faulty intelligence had conflated the identities…

Mohandas Gandhi ‘fostered a death cult’ in which courage, not nonviolence, was the supreme virtue, headed an authoritarian movement in which ‘to doubt Gandhi was to doubt God’, and ‘had a party line, not just on sexual abstinence and vegetarianism, but also on “idle jokes” (opposed), “innocent pleasantries” (perhaps)... and pencils and fountain pens (opposed).’

Moreover, though he denounced both property damage and trespass as ‘pure violence’, he was not a pacifist in the…

In its 2010 report ‘Building a Political Firewall Against Israel’s Delegitimization’, the Tel Aviv-based Reut Institute speculated that ‘the Jewish world is growing more distant from Israel’ because ‘a growing number of Jews do not have enough historical knowledge’.

In his latest book, Norman Finkelstein argues persuasively that – at least in the case of the US – the reverse is true: namely, that a growing section of the disproportionately liberal US Jewish public (only African-…

Gabriel writes: Gabriel Carlyle. PHOTO: Purshi

The renowned Japanese scholar DT Suzuki was once asked what it was like to attain the Buddhist state of satori, or enlightenment. ‘Well, it’s like ordinary, everyday experience,’ he is supposed to have replied, ‘except about two inches off the ground.’

After a week-long Buddhist-inflected workshop on burnout earlier this year, my feet were still planted firmly on the ground – and I certainly hadn’t reached enlightenment – but I did feel…

Today’s corporate Olympics is a far cry from the movement’s original vision of ‘a potent… factor in securing universal peace’. Perryman believes a better Games is possible, proposing a combination of decentralisation, ditching “rich men’s” sports, and banning commercial use of the Olympics symbol. Worth reading even if you hate sport.

Roughly the same proportion of the British public ‘approves’ of US drone strikes as ‘disapproves’, according to a new poll by Pew Global Attitudes.

The international survey, polling 20 countries around the world, found that while 47% of the British public ‘disapprove of the [US] conducting missile strikes from pilotless aircraft called drones to target extremists in countries such as Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia’ (arguably a leading question), almost as many (44%) ‘approve’ of such…

In Britain 47% disapprove of US drone strikes, against 44% who approve. Along with the US and India, Britain is an outlier on this: witness the "disapprove" rates for Greece (90%), Egypt (89%), Jordan (85%), Turkey (81%), Spain (76%), Brazil (76%) and Japan (75%). (It may be worth pointing out that the question asked - with its reference to "target[ing] extermists" - was somewhat leading:  "Do you approve or disapprove of the United States conducting missile strikes from pilotless aircraft…

In November 1950, 52 delegates arrived in Dover, bound for the third congress of the (Communist-inspired) World Peace Council in Sheffield. All but one were denied entry.

Whether the Foreign Office considered modern art too esoteric to have much propaganda value (across the pond the CIA took a different tack, covertly promoting Abstract Expressionism as a Cold War weapon) or it was simply too embarassing to turn back the world’s most famous living artist, Picasso was admitted.

‘Hold this a moment, while I staple these.’ Ninety minutes and nearly a mile later, I was still holding aloft the mid-section of the giant green dinosaur, and being used as cover by some masked youths making a grab for some plastic barriers. ‘If the police move in to arrest people, I’m off,’ the hind legs told me.

Several hundred people – variously dressed as Robin Hood and giant flowers – had met outside the Grange Hotel near St Paul’s cathedral, venue of the UK Energy Summit, for…

On 15 May, lawyers from Leigh Day & Co and Public Interest Lawyers (PIL) – the latter acting on behalf of well-known peace activist Maya Evans – won the right to a further judicial review of the transfer of prisoners from British to Afghan forces.

As a consequence, the UK announced that all British transfers to the Afghan authorities in Kabul, Kandahar and Lashkar Gah would be stopped – and the court made clear that it expected this moratorium to be observed until the review has…

Describing the result as ‘a Bradford Spring’ moment, ‘a kind of uprising, a peaceful democratic uprising of especially young people’, Galloway pointed out that: ‘No party to the left of Labour has ever taken a Labour seat in a period when Labour has been in opposition.’

Guardian political editor Patrick Wintour cited Galloway’s allegedly ‘fundamentalist’ call for an immediate withdrawal from Afghanistan and his…

Two recent agreements between the US and Afghan governments suggest that US/UK ‘withdrawal’ (actually, thousands of US troops will remain and ‘continue to participate in combat missions’, according to White House spokesperson Jay Carney) will be accompanied by increased use of Afghan proxies to torture, imprison and assassinate

The first, signed 9 March, transferred the ‘management’ of the US prison complex at…